The Journey of a Runaway Minion

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Laugh Motherducker !

A beggar will go up to a car sadly, plead, whine, mewl. The driver will stare at her sadly, then drop some money in her hand. She will walk away sadly and he will drive away sadly. A bunch of teenagers will hang out sadly, and between “yaars” and “bros” will commiserate with each other about how sad life is. A gaggle of housewives will sit down behind expensive china, and sadly talk about how shitty their husbands and lives are, with a little servant boy sadly bringing them pastries, while in the background HumTV sadly tells them what to think. Waiters, shopkeepers, businessmen, news anchors, cricket players, even the Prime Minister, will always look perpetually sad and despondent. And most of the time they aren’t even faking it.

This place has become one big pity party. Everyone is sad, and comfortable being so. Almost every social transaction is undertaken beneath the umbrella of gloom and depression, so that you are actually worse off for having reached out to another human being in many cases. Simply put, sad people will make you sadder. It’s infectious, and more harmful than a zombie outbreak. Over here it’s considered a normal, accepted way of being. Happiness is looked upon as weirdness. If you laugh too much, or too loudly, people will give you funny looks. You better shut the fuck up with your happiness, their eyes warn. Be miserable like the rest of us.

This is just not good enough.

The poor are sad because the nature of their daily trials don’t allow them the luxury of mirth. Fair enough. The more well-to-do are sad because the poor are poor. We don’t want to be that asshole – laughing and joking while the country burns. So the big lie we feed ourselves is that our sadness is justified; that it counts for something. Look at me, I am commiserating. Boo fucking hoo. I am showing solidarity with my fellow brethren. Now excuse me while I sadly eat some more samosas and sadly play on my iPad and leave sad comments on social media.

We also play sad because life is cheap here; just about anyone is expendable. Personal safety is simply not guaranteed. And that’s a pretty sad notion. Let’s just keep our heads down to up our survival rate; that crazy person who is super exuberant and joyful is going to get it one of these days, we say to ourselves. We are simply being realistic.

But both of these notions, and any others that lead to the same behavior, are wrongheaded lies. Your being sad doesn’t help the poor of this country. Your being sad certainly doesn’t improve your odds of escaping the fickleness of fate. All your being sad accomplishes is your sadness. It is a selfish, vicious cycle which loves to feed off itself; before you know it, the years in your life and the life in your years have been wholly consumed by your sadness. And then you can die sadly.

Because being perpetually sad is unnatural. Man was designed to laugh and make merry, it’s a critical aspect of being human. I’m not saying we should all start crazy happy laughing frolicking and running around (even though more of that would be beautiful to see) – but I am saying that sad people are fucking useless; they are too busy being sad to get anything done. If you think you are helping by commiserating, then that is you being silly. Which isn’t really a surprise, because sad people are silly people.

Consider the alternative for a moment: to be brave enough to be happy, joyful, appreciative of life, no matter what pile of poop smacks you in the face. This is a more difficult option – choosing love is always more difficult than choosing fear – but it is infinitely more effective. Because let’s face it: most of our problems aren’t really that bad, we’ve just gotten comfortable complaining about meaningless shit. All of us, boys and girls, men and women alike, have started acting like arthritic aunties, scrambling past each other to see who can woe-is-me our lives away faster. And as for the real, pertinent problems that we do have: those will only be solved by action, not by pity or guilt or misery.

A friend of mine very rightly says that it has gotten fashionable to be depressed over here. That’s the persona many well-to-do and well-off people, especially youngsters, will adopt, because it fits the cultural narrative. But it’s a bullshit, debilitating character to embody. It helps absolutely no one, except maybe hash dealers.

The Law of Attraction has been built up a lot, but at its basics its a poetic description of a simple human concept: our brains operate on patterns, and sift through external information based on whichever pattern is activated within. If you think the world around you is shitty and sad and mean to you, you’ll find evidence for that wherever you look. But if you dig deeper and search for love and happiness and courage and beauty, you’ll find evidence for that too, often in the most surprising places. Including within.

So laugh motherfucker. It’s all going to be over soon anyways. Do yourself and those around you a favor and stop being so sullen. Make mistakes, get hurt, laugh it off, rinse and repeat. Taking yourself, or this life, too seriously, may well be the greatest waste of time. Let go of your need for control. That is all a lie anyway. Instead, offer all that you can to the world, every ounce, every kernel, every nugget, instead of sitting around complaining about how little the world offers you. You might just make a difference that way, and you’ll have some fun doing it too.